The 1990's decade has been marked by a societal technological revolution driven by the convergence of the data processing industry with the consumer electronics industry. Like all such revolutions, it unleashed a significant ripple effect of technological waves. The effect has in turn driven technologies which have been known and available but relatively quiescent over the years. A major one of these technologies is the internet-related distribution of documents made up of display pages such as internet World Wide Web pages which contain text and images. The convergence of the electronic entertainment and consumer industries with data processing exponentially accelerated the demand for wide ranging communications distribution channels, and the World Wide Web or internet which had quietly existed for over a generation as a loose academic and government data distribution facility reached “critical mass” and commenced a period of phenomenal expansion. With this expansion, businesses and consumers have direct access to all manner of documents and media. In addition, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which had been the documentation language of the internet World Wide Web for years offered direct links between pages and other documentation on the Web and a variety of related data sources which were at first text and then evolved into media, i.e. “hypermedia”. This even further exploded the use of the internet or World Wide Web. It was now possible for the Web browser or wanderer to spend literally hours going through document after document and accompanying media events in often less than productive excursions through the Web. These excursions often strained the users' time and resources. In order for the internet to mature from its great expectations to solid commercial fruition, it will be necessary for the internet to greatly reduce its drain on time and related resources or to provide greater communication bandwidth.
A significant source of this drain is in the Web page, the basic document page of the Web. In the case of Web pages, we do not have the situation of a relatively small group of professional designers working out the human factors; rather in the era of the Web, anyone and everyone can design a Web page. As a result, pages are frequently designed by developers without imaging or graphic skills. Such inexperienced designers cannot be expected to be very efficient or economical in their allocation of image resources. Thus, the value of such images is often far outweighed by their drain on the receiver's resources and time. Many images require relatively great amounts of time to download at the receiving station. In addition, there appears to be an increasing amount of advertising on the Web wherein the seeker of information at times has to be subjected to “commercials”, often in the time and resource taxing image formats.
The present invention provides a solution to this downloading problem by providing a universal or global library of images which the creator of display pages may use. Each of the selectable images is represented by a data identifier so that during the transmission and distribution of the pages only the identifiers need be downloaded.